THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: INTELLIGENCE

THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: INTELLIGENCE; White House Cites Iraq's History of Seeking Arms as a Reason for War

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: January 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29—
The Bush administration, justifying its decision to go to war against Iraq despite its failure since then to find any banned weapons there, said Thursday that even if Saddam Hussein had not amassed stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the United States could not have afforded to leave him in power because he had a history of trying to acquire them.

On the defensive since its former chief weapons inspector said he now believed that Iraq did not have any substantial stockpiles of banned weapons at the start of the war, the White House sent Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to appear on the three network morning news programs to carry the message that the war was justified even if Mr. Hussein's weapons stockpiles are ultimately found to have been nonexistent.

''With Saddam Hussein, we were dealing with somebody who had used weapons of mass destruction, who had attacked his neighbors twice, who was allowing terrorists to run in his country and was funding terrorists outside of his country,'' Ms. Rice said on the ''Early Show'' on CBS.

''Given that, and his history of refusing to account for his weapons of mass destruction and his efforts to conceal his programs, this was a very dangerous man in a very dangerous part of the world,'' she added. ''And the president of the United States had no choice but to deal with that gathering threat to American interests and to the interests of our friends abroad.''

Ms. Rice continued to rebuff calls from many Democrats and from the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, for an independent election-year inquiry into how the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence organizations apparently misjudged the extent and the sophistication of Mr. Hussein's weapons programs before the war.

But she signaled that President Bush would support a more narrowly focused review of American intelligence capabilities in the war on terrorism if the inquiry could be done at a time and in a manner under the White House's control.

Before the administration undertakes any review, she said, it wants to have the final report of the organization Dr. Kay headed until last week, the Iraq Survey Group. The group's new leader, Charles A. Duelfer, has said he does not know how long it will take to finish scouring Iraq for arms and evidence of weapons programs.

There is no doubt ''that we're going to need to go back and compare what we thought we would find with what we found,'' she said on ''Good Morning America'' on ABC. ''And at that time, I think there are important questions about how we deal with the proliferation problem with highly secretive regimes that are using dual-use technologies to acquire weapons of mass destruction.''

The closest she came to acknowledging a problem with the intelligence used by Mr. Bush in making a case for the war came when she told CBS that ''what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground.''

She alluded to a feeling at the White House that the intelligence services had played a vital role in stopping or slowing arms programs in North Korea, Iran and Libya, among other nations. But she suggested that any fundamental problems with intelligence capabilities centered on underestimating the threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs in those countries rather than on what Democrats have characterized as a deliberate effort by the administration to overstate the threat from Iraq.

''The fact is, it's usually been underestimation of programs of weapons of mass destruction, not overestimation, that has been the problem for the world,'' she told ABC. On CBS, she cited ''a problem of dealing with very closed societies that are doing everything they can to hide the extent and nature of their programs.''

In Congress, Republicans closed ranks with the White House to head off any new inquiry.

''The Senate Intelligence Committee, of which I am a member, is well along in a thorough review of the estimates provided to Congress and the executive branch concerning Iraq,'' said Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. ''Congress has this responsibility and should complete its work before decisions are made about the need for further analysis.''

A Republican aide in Congress said there was almost no chance of an outside inquiry getting under way this year, and little political risk from the issue for the White House or Congressional Republicans.

''The Republicans are not going to push for an investigation and the Democrats don't have enough votes to get one,'' the aide said.